Rebellions seek to become the first Korean startup AI chips company

Rebellions seek to become the first Korean startup AI chips company is profiled by BTW Media because published evidence links it to internet infrastructure, governance, operational dependencies, or market visibility.

• Rebellions, a fabless AI chip company co-founded by five South Korean engineers, is viewed as the country’s best hope to rival Nvidia in AI inference
• Rebellions has secured backing from some of the biggest names in the South Korean tech industry, including Samsung, telecoms company KT, and internet firm Kakao.

OUR TAKE
The global semiconductor industry has seen a surge in demand for AI chips, fuelled by the popularity of US start-up OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The establishment of Rebellions will be an important milestone for the South Korean chip industry, as Atom (the latest chip Rebellions makes) will be the first domestically developed, mass-produced chip to support language models.
-Jennifer YU, BTW reporter

Korea artificial intelligence (AI) chip company Rebellions is viewed as the country’s best hope to rival Nvidia in AI inference. 

Chips from Rebellions

These chips, called Atom, are the latest neural processing units (NPUs), targeting artificial intelligence (AI) models trained with up to 7 billion parameters.

The processors are being tested against industry-leading A100 graphics processing units (GPUs) from US giant Nvidia.

Regarded as the next generation of AI chips, NPUs are optimised to perform so-called simultaneous matrix operations, which give them a step up in the AI method known as deep learning, compared with general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs.

“We are much more energy-efficient than Nvidia’s GPUs in AI inference,” said Park Sung-hyun, CEO and co-founder of Rebellions.

“Atom is up to five times more power-efficient than Nvidia’s A100, but in a language model inference benchmark test, Atom’s latency – a measure of the speed of performance of chips – was just half of Nvidia’s A2,” he added.

In practice, that means the Atom chips can be cooled down by only fans, while Nvidia chips need to operate in air-conditioned rooms that consume more electricity and entail higher operating costs.

Also read: Tenstorrent, An AI Chip Startup, Raised $100 Million

Support from other companies

With a surge in demand for AI chips in the global market, South Korea as a major producer of memory chips, is hoping to gain a strong foothold in this booming market.

Samsung is racing against global giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for dominance in AI chip-making, while the South Korean government aims to grow the share of locally developed AI chips in domestic data centres to 80% by 2030.

Rebellions has secured backing from some of the biggest names in the South Korean tech industry, including Samsung, telecoms company KT and internet firm Kakao.

In January, Rebellions raised US$124 million in a funding round led by KT, which has invested over US$50 million in the start-up so far, bringing its valuation to US$650 million and making it the most-funded chip start-up in the country.